Branding

Whatever your business venture, from selling weird and wonderful items online to a straightforward service for customers and clients, the tone and brand is everything. When you are creating a business image, it needs to be consistent, despite the platform it is on. And when we work online, we can have a lot of control over the brand, but what happens when we step into the real world and need it to be a logical extension of what we provide online? How can this be achieved?

Crafting The Image Carefully

When budget is an issue, you’ve got to learn how to make the most of your limited resources. And in fact, this can work to your advantage, when your resources are minimal. If you have a skeleton staff, for example, and they work online and offline, this is a very simple way to maintain some control over the tone of voice. And when you start to outsource for extra help, it’s an easy way to communicate this overall business image, despite your limitations. Virtual offices work very well in this respect, and on www.yourvirtualofficelondon.co.uk you can make the most of call answering services as well as other virtual functions that can provide this comprehensive image.

Using The Same Language

When it comes to brand voice, it should form a natural part of your business ethics. If you spend a lot of time discussing the tone of voice and specific words, this becomes part of the company culture. And when you are discussing topics offline, you should make the online tone follow the same pattern. It’s a far more organic way to develop this going from offline to online, rather than the other way around. Because online copy can be tweaked with so much, it can lose a lot of its human qualities.

Leverage User-generated Content Online

There are certain aspects of your business that only functions well online. User-generated content is one of those things and can comprise so many different aspects, including online reviews, recommendations from colleagues, as well as videos of photos from customers. You can learn more about user-generated content on www.sproutsocial.com so prospects can learn what it’s like to work with you. This can be difficult to harness, especially if you are setting up more offline meetings, but it helps to bridge the gap between the business and potential customers.

Building The Relationship

If you have prospects that you deal with online, work at meeting them in an offline capacity, and vice versa. This helps to provide a stronger bond between the two entities, while at the same time, ensuring that your brand and tone are fleshed out further. Ultimately, building a relationship between business and client, or company and customer, is about making it more “3D”. This is why many businesses can struggle if they have a purely online relationship with their clients.

It can be a very difficult thing to achieve, but the mistakes that many modern businesses are making, namely providing an online service only, only goes to serve the fact that these companies fall by the wayside when customers are demanding a more comprehensive approach to service. This means matching online to the offline, or if you will, the virtual to the reality.

Did you know… 31st January is “Inspire Your Heart With Art Day“, it’s the day that in 1849 that the Corn Laws were abolished in Britain, in 1865 Congress passes 13th Amendment, abolishing slavery in America, its Backward Day, and in 1961 Ham the space chimp returns to earth safely.

But what’s this got to do with you and your business?

Planning is Everything in Business & Media

Ok it seem’s a little odd that a bunch of dates with “world days” and historic events could mean something to a business but let’s focus on the planning aspect a second. Think back to my recent post about planning a kickstarter campaign, everything was about the data and ensuring that you were aware of events, you knew about other successes and failures and your learned from them. This is kind of the same thing.

With anything in business you want to know that what you are doing is going to have the best chance of success, so you look at what others have done and learn. You may do what Wickes did recently with the launch of the starwars film and attempt to hijack a newstory for your gain – it can really work.

But unless you’ve a fairly big budget maybe attempting to hijack a film is a little out of reach.

Instead the things listed today are events, awareness days, historic activities you can write about, plan things for well in advance. You don’t have to spend a ton of money on them, maybe just create a few graphics for the day for social media, writing articles or having a sale to promote it and engage with the day – drawing attention to it and your business.

If you find something you really engage with and you have a view that differs from others, or a story of your own, speak to a journalist a few weeks or months in advance – don’t ask them the day before the event to cover your item, it’s too late.

It won’t always be easy, there are literally thousands maybe millions of awareness days, so be selective – too much and your audience will ignore you, so be engaging and interesting and of course ensure that they are appropriate to your business.

Top Tip: Yes cover the ones everyone does, things like Small Business Saturday, but also cover strange days that people may not have heard of like national cuddle up day, or to help push sales of a homeless charity calendar we used national homeless day – these aren’t generally top of peoples minds but that’s why they will stand out!

The single best resource I’ve found for (reliable) information of “what happened on this day” is this old clunky bbc website, I’m not sure how long it will float around for though. It’s one of their legacy sites that may get shut down. http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday

If you want to get ahead of the game and plan your strategy for marketing grab the 2017 media diary from Janet Murray for £33.35 – its an amazing tool and will really help kickstart your business to growth in 2017.

Towards the end of last year I asked clients I worked with a simple question “what are you struggling with?”

The universal reply was that they wanted to reach a bigger audience, but after a few follow up questions it turns out they actually wanted to reach a better more qualified audience that was more likely to engage and switch from being a potential customer (or service user) to being a service user.

In 2016 I witnessed around 90% of my clients experience the same issues with digital marketing and SEO – they each struggled to overcome those issues for different reasons, and my clients weren’t alone. I spoke to other businesses and social organisations and they struggled too with the same things. So in this article I want to give you 5 New Years Resolutions which will boost your business in 2017.

1) I Will Write Every Day

The curse of writers block – its something we all suffer from, even those of us who have written articles for years. But the best way to overcome it is not to set a day aside a month and try to write 10 articles, but rather to constantly write little and often. Practice makes perfect – and it oils those brainy cogs.

My advice is to set 30 minutes aside each day just for writing blogs/articles or updating content on your website, something related to your content directly. It doesn’t matter if it ends up online or not, what matters is the habit-forming and practice your are getting.

The reality of this New Years Resolution is that it will enable you to Blog at Least Once Per Week – that’s right not once or twice a month, once per week is your goal here. Be regular – Post on the same day each week, schedule them in, write ahead of then so you aren’t rushing and can do some research, you can then plan what you are writing.

Daily: 30 MinutesWeekly: 2hrs 30 mins

2) Create Campaigns That Last 2 Months (or More!)

This sounds odd for a small business, but the reality is that SME’s and Social Enterprises don’t have huge amounts of cash to throw at advertising and what little they do needs to be used carefully – testing adverts, creating awesome graphics (hopefully you’ve found some amazing tutorials to do that also) and getting some help if needed.

A 2 month campaign allows you to start to test what your audience is receptive too and what it isn’t. Lessons that you can use in your next campaign too. For example – if you are a photographer and you found that a specific page such as Manchester Wedding Photographer worked better than your homepage in adverts, you may summise that other specific pages such as Lake District Wedding Photographer would do well too in adverts. Conversely you may find the homepage outperforms these because maybe it has a great slideshow on it.

A longer offer / campaign also allows more people more time to see and digest your offers, and may make you seem less “flakey”.

3) I Will Listen to One Podcast Per Week

Podcasts are an amazing source of information that will help your business grow, both in terms of audience size and revenue. They are also a really handy way to keep up to date with the latest news from Google and elsewhere in the web, plus you can listen on the way to work, at the gym or even whilst typing a blog 😉

Note: Not all blogs are loved by everyone, some styles fit some ears better than others, so feel free to look around and pick and choose. Here are a few of my most loved currently.

4) I Will Master The Use of Social Media

Mastering social media can be a time-hole if you don’t know where to look. There are so many tutorials and blogs out there that it can be a little scary, also how do you measure your success?

Ok, I won’t answer all that in this bit of text but the reality is Facebook and Twitter are huge and are not going away. Instagram continue to grow and video is a key part of any social media strategy for 2017 and beyond. Learning how social media can work for your business and social enterprise is going to be a key part of what you do this year and it will pay off really quickly, it will take some time but the results are a larger audience base that interacts and will convert more often.

5) I Will Ask for Help

Relax. This isn’t a sales pitch.

In the resolutions above I’ve set weekly tasks of 5hrs 30 mins – across the week its just over an hour a day – all stuff that will really help your business. It’s realistic to think you can achieve the above.

My 5th New Years Resolution is all about being realistic and setting goals that are achievable, but goals which you will need help with. Goals which you may need to ask for someones guidance on, some help on creating graphics or materials, some advice on which email service to use, some advice on how to make the most of your website.

The reality is we are not all knowing oracles. No one person is an expert in everything and that is why we search for things online, we search for guides on this that and everything else. Asking for a hand now and again is normally the way to get the best outcome. Don’t be afraid to ask for a helping hand.

I am delighted to write today that I have been shortlisted for 3 awards, 2 at the UK Blog Awards for this blog and 1 at the Made in Manchester awards for the work I have done.

The Made in Manchester Awards celebrate excellence in innovation, entrepreneurial spirit, training and development and leadership in Greater Manchester. The awards are based on written entries which are then shortlisted, followed by interviews from which an expert judging panel select the winner.

I am shortlisted in the Marketing Professional of the Year category, which has some fantastic other marketers shortlisted too. It’s amazing to see my name next to their names and SEO Andy in the company of much larger marketing organisations.

The UK Blog Awards (UKBA) is all about celebrating great blogging across all kinds of industries, from health & beauty to digital marketing to photography. It doesn’t matter if your blog is a year old or 10 years old the UKBA is welcoming to all entrants.

We are shortlisted in two categories for the UKBA17 awards. This is now the stage where we need you to get clicking and voting – you have until Dec 19th 2016. Here’s how

1) Click to this address bit.ly/ukba17 2) Enter your name and e-mail (you can only vote once per email)) Select both categories from the drop-down) Hit submit

What we’d really love is that once you’ve voted that you share this link and ask others to vote too. The more votes we can get the more likely we are to win, so please do share the link.

Stage 1: The Questions

If you’re going to do anything, it’s important to know why you’re doing it. By applying this logic to giveaways, it’s simple to come up with a few key questions that you need to ask yourself:

What is the goal of the event? Every aspect of the project will depend on the answer. Set a clear target and always keep it in mind.

How will you measure results? There are many metrics you can look at. Likes, shares, email addresses, and so on. Find what’s relevant and start observing.

Where will it be held? You’ve got plenty of channels to choose from. Your safest bet is to pick the one with the biggest and most active audience.

How long will the giveaway last? Set a timetable and stay organized. A small giveaway can last for a week or two, but a large one should take three or even four weeks. Make sure you have time to reach your goals.

What will the prizes be? You can’t just offer random stuff and expect people to care. Choose the rewards carefully. Offer something attractive that will also represent your brand well.

How are you going to promote the giveaway? Such an event needs a lot of marketing to get the best results. Decide where and how often you’ll talk about the giveaway. If you’ll spend money on ads, set a budget and some keywords.

How will you pick the winners? Will you do it randomly or under certain conditions? If you pick winners according to certain criteria, be as clear and transparent as possible. Being accused of rigging the giveaway is the last thing you want.

Once you’ve answered all these questions, your job will become a lot easier. Make sure everything is written down for reference.

Stage 2: Pre-Launch Promotion

If the social media giveaway just springs up overnight, the results will be modest at best. You have to start hyping it up early. At launch, you should already have more buzz than a beehive.

My advice is to stick to free marketing methods for now. There’s not much of a point to buy ads if people can’t sign up yet. Your goal is to raise awareness.

Start posting about the giveaway on social media. You should focus mostly on the channel you’ll use but show your other accounts some love as well. Use all your social media marketing skills for this, don’t hold back.

Our giveaway is being held on Twitter, and you know how it goes. You have to post often and include loads of cool images or gifs.

Another important matter is what you’ll talk about. Empty reminders won’t do. Here are the relevant topics:

The Reason Behind the Giveaway

When It Starts

How to Join

The Prizes – this should be your primary focus

Don’t be afraid to be silly or make jokes. A social media giveaway is a fun event, not a formal meeting.

Stage 3: Blastoff!

After plenty of teasing and hype, it’s time to start. Your number one objective at this point is to be active on the platform. Post like there’s no tomorrow and get as many people as possible to share.

If you’ve chosen Twitter as a home-base, don’t let the character limit discourage you. We’ve found that posting Tweets in quick succession as part of a “speech” works quite well. You’re making your point clearly while also making sure your audience hears you.

Post a sticky about the giveaway on your profile. This way, anyone who visits it will hear about the event. At this point, you can also let your ads loose, so you get even more people on board.

Stage 4: Post-Launch Promotion

Talk about the giveaway at least once a day from launch until its end. As time passes, traffic will decrease, and your goal is to keep that from happening.

This stage is the perfect moment to get some outside help. Contact influencers in your industry and get them to spread the news. Look for collaboration or guest post opportunities and promote further.

Don’t assume that all the participants know and understand all the prizes. Present them in detail, link to product descriptions and reviews if possible.

Show the people who already entered the contest some love. Keep them up-to-date with any giveaway-related news. Thank them for showing their interest and support.

Stage 5: The Wrap-Up and the Evaluation

Once you’re ready, it’s time to announce the winner. Do it by emailing everyone who got a piece of the action. Personalize your emails to make the recipients feel truly special.

Take time to ask them if they’d be OK with being featured on your website. Most people will be thrilled with the idea. Others might value their privacy, so you should respect their wishes.

But what about the ones who didn’t win anything? They don’t necessarily have to leave empty-handed. If you have the possibility, here are some suggestions:

Offer them a gift card for a modicum of money

Offer a price reduction for any purchases made through your store. Make it sound “exclusive”.

When it’s time to post on your web page, thank everyone involved in the process:

The participants, most of all

The influencers who helped you with the giveaway

Your staff and friends for being there through it all

You shouldn’t stop the buzz train here. Generate more traffic by creating content based on your reward announcements.

After you’ve exhausted your bag of content, gather all the metrics involved and compare them to the initial ones. If you did everything right, you should see an increase.

It should also give you an idea of what you need to improve for the next giveaway – because there totally needs to be a “next time”.

Conclusion

Giveaways are a win-win situation: Your audience has some fun, gets some prizes. You gain popularity and some information. Doesn’t that sound great?

Hopefully, this will encourage you to start your very own contest. After all, who doesn’t like winning?